I got yet another hoity-toity self-righteous sanctimonious lecture from yet another garden variety liberal regarding an article I wrote titled, “Who Spent More? Average Bush Vs. Average Obama Spending Per Day Proves Obama Most Reckless And Irresponsible EVER.” She rants about “truth” and “logic” and asserts – without believing she should have any reason to back up any of her claims in response to an article that is filled with documented facts.
This is my slightly cleaned-up response:
How about a little “truth” and “logic” for you.
Truth 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kuTG19Cu_Q
“The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion for the first 42 presidents – #43 added $4 trillion by his lonesome, so that we now have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back — $30,000 for every man, woman and child. That’s irresponsible. It’s unpatriotic.” — Barack Obama, 3 July 2008
Now, liberals don’t mind lies. Liberals don’t mind bogus personal attacks. Liberals don’t mind slander. As long as it comes from the left. But truth #1 is that Barack Obama demonized George Bush and promised the American people that if we elected him:
Truth #2: Obama promised that he would cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term:
“Today I’m pledging to cut the deficit we inherited by half by the end of my first term in office,” Obama said. “Now, this will not be easy. It will require us to make difficult decisions and face challenges we’ve long neglected. But I refuse to leave our children with a debt that they cannot repay, and that means taking responsibility right now, in this administration, for getting our spending under control.”
Fact (“logic”): Federal deficit for 2008 that Obama inherited: $459 billion. Deficits since Obama took office: 2009: $1.413 trillion; 2010: $1.293 trillion; 2011: $1.300 trillion; 2012: $1.327. George Bush didn’t pass the stupid stimulus that will cost the American people $3.27 TRILLION and which didn’t do anything but create a political slush fund for Obama to use for his political cronies.
Fact (“logic”): Let’s consider that Obama rammed his stimulus through ($862 billion) and put it on Bush’s fiscal year budget tab even though Bush didn’t pass it and Republicans most certainly didn’t vote for it. Obama rammed a giant Omnibus bill through his Democrat Congress for another $410 billion that very few Republicans voted for. That’s also on the 2009 budget deficit. Obama of course blamed Bush for the entire $700 billion for TARP even though Obama voted for it and even though Bush gave Obama fully half of it ($350 billion) to spend in his own administration. Obama rammed through the federal takeover of GM and the $24 billion that went into that bailout. Even as Obama praises himself for it and exploits it to attack Republicans, in actual fact he attributes every single penny that paid for that bailout to Bush’s presidency even while he lies like a snake in misrepresenting its costs and benefits. That, for the record, if you add it up, is $1.646 trillion in Obama spending that Obama sneaks into the 2009 deficit which gets attributed to the last year of George Bush. And on top of that Obama calculated that the Iraq War would go on forever unless Obama ended it such that ending the war was “his savings” even though in fact Bush had negotiated the Iraq withdrawal before leaving office. Obama in citing the end of the Iraq War as “his savings” implicitly claims that he is saving $100 billion a year even though that’s an outright lie because Bush had already won the war and negotiated the withdrawal of forces. Obama deceitfully and dishonestly saddled all of that debt and bogus assumption onto Bush in order to fabricate a huge “Bush deficit” that Obama actually compiled and then conveniently made that “Bush deficit” his baseline for “Bush’s deficit”. Rather than the actual Bush record over eight years.
Obama does that because he can’t lie and fabricate Bush’s actual real deficits. As an example, the last budget deficit that was passed by George Bush under Republican leadership was for only $161 billion for Fiscal Year 2007.
The fact of the matter is that annual budget deficits under Bush and Republicans are now MONTHLY deficits under Obama and Democrats. The fact of the matter is that Democrats have not passed a budget for 1,180 days so far. The fact is that Obama doesn’t want you to think about that kind of leadership Bush demonstrated over his presidency; he wants you to think about “Bush’s debt” in 2009 with all of Obama’s very OWN vile spending packed onto it after HE took office in 2009. That just continues the trend of a president who has proven pathologically incapable of assuming responsibility for anything: it doesn’t matter if Obama did it, it’s “Bush’s fault.”
Fact (“logic”): “Today I’m pledging to cut the deficit we inherited by half by the end of my first term in office.” We now know that Obama is a liar without shame. Because today the deficit is 189 percent higher than the one that Obama inherited when Obama promised the American people it would be 50 percent lower.
Truth #3: Bush added $4.8 trillion to the national debt over eight years in office (it was $5.768 trillion the day Bush II assumed office). Obama has added $6 trillion in just his first four years.
Fact (“logic”): “The National Debt stood at $10.626 trillion the day Mr. Obama was inaugurated.”
Fact (“logic”): The national debt is currently at $15.914 trillion and soaring faster than the eye can follow.
Fact (“logic”): That’s an increase of $5.287 trillion under Obama’s watch. Which aint anywhere near over yet even if he isn’t re-elected. This time last year the national debt was $14.3 trillion (July 28, 2011). At Obama’s rate of debt spiralling, the national debt will be $941 billion higher than it is right now by January 20, 2013. Which means the national debt will be $16.9 trillion by the time he’s gone even if he gets his ass kicked out of office the way he so richly deserves given his own lies and rhetoric.
I said $6 trillion in four years. And yes, Obama will have increased the debt by MORE THAN $6 trillion in just four years: from $10.6 to $16.9 trillion. And it might be even worse than that because this fool is clearly completely out of control. Assuming no surprises, that is $6.3 trillion in just four years compared to the $4.8 trillion over eight years that Democrats demonized Bush over.
For the record, just to kill yet another liberal lie, “Bush’s wars” were NOT “unfunded.” It was DEMOCRATS who took the Iraq and Afghanistan War spending “off the books” because Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid did not want to put liberal Democrats in the position of voting for war spending and at the same time they did not want independents to vote against Democrats for refusing to support the troops in time of war. Every penny of the wars was properly accounted for by means of other spending authorization devices that showed up in Bush’s debt. As this article points out, even in 2009 several departments including Defense, the Veterans Administration, Military Construction, and Homeland Security were not being funded using normal budget methods.
Another liberal lie that needs to die and stay dead is that Bill Clinton gave us a budget surplus. Bullcrap. The national debt increased EVERY SINGLE YEAR OF THE CLINTON PRESIDENCY.
Stop believing lies or at least have the decency to stop voting.
Obama has been spending at a rate of at least 2.625 times the spending rate that Bush racked up over his eight years in office. As it is, only an utterly rabid nutjob would claim that Bush somehow spent more than Obama – but tragically we’re surrounded by rabid nutjobs. And that 2.625 times is actually if everything is rosy; because the fact of the matter is that Bush’s second four years were considerably worse spending-wise than his first four – and there is no reason that Obama – should he be re-elected – will repeat that history. In fact I believe the debt will explode like nothing we can possibly imagine if America is cursed with another four years of Obama. Consider the fact that ObamaCare ALONE has a $17 trillion funding gap. And the damn healthcare takeover hasn’t even been implemented yet so it can truly explode.
And when it comes to spending, “In Obama’s second term, it’s on, because we don’t have to worry about re-election.” And if it’s not “on” already, we’re going to implode, sink and die if it gets turned “on” in a second Obama term.
Tags: Bush spending, debt, national debt, Obama spending, spending, who spent more?
Start Thinking Right 
July 29, 2012 at 6:43 pm
The other day, I heard a talking head reference the Clinton budget surplus. Of course, the talking head was a lefty and didn’t know what he was talking about. Yes, Billy paid down the public debt, but he borrowed money from intra-governmental holdings (mostly social security) to do this. For those that don’t know, the national debt is public debt + intra-governmental holdings. When you add those two together, Billy never had a surplus, not even one year. Also, the Clinton government had the benefit of the Nasdaq stock bubble, which provided it with massive inflows of capital gains taxes to help offset the deficit. Of course, this was all just a bubble pumped up by easy money from the Fed. The wealth was fake, but the Clinton government benefited tremendously from it. If not for it, I am sure the deficits would have been far greater. Also, the republicans in both the House and Senate kept clintonomics from destroying the economy. Republicans, fighting tooth and nail, restrained Clinton from doing what liberals do best, and that is tax and spend.
It is very simple: If Obama wins, we will be destroyed!
July 29, 2012 at 9:38 pm
Free Market Capitalist,
Obama is a skinny, dumbo-eared Death Star.
If Romney wins, he will still need an exorcist to come in and wrestle with all the thousands of demons that started filling that place on January 20, 2009.
For the record, the article here is a pretty thorough demonstration of what Free Market Capitalist is describing.
There were a few other things that I would point to:
1) The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-90 created a period of uncertainty for the world. Examples: how was Western Europe going to assimilate the Eastern European “Soviet bloc” countries as the USSR collapsed? What was going to happen to the many nations that had depended on the USSR for loans and assistance? For the most part, the market does NOT like uncertainty. This was in large part the reason for the recession that hit the Bush 1 presidency. By the time Clinton was in office, most of those issues had largely worked themselves out or been worked out.
2) Recessions generally don’t last that long unless turds like Obama run things, so the US began to surge back. And most times the surge results in an exceptional period of growth – again unless a turd like Obama is in charge. So the economy was bouncing back from its recession just as Clinton took office.
3) Bill Clinton was THE beneficiary of the so-called “peace dividend” that had been won by Reagan and Bush I. It was Reagan’s buildup that resulted in the collapse of the USSR, and Bush further expanded that collapse by prevailing over key former Soviet ally Iraq in the Gulf War. When Bill Clinton gutted both the military and intelligence capabilities of the US – which for the record resulted in a weak and blind US being unable to stop the 9/11 attack – he “saved” hundreds of billions of dollars in defense/intelligence spending. It was a foolish savings, but there is no question that Clinton politically benefitted from it.
4) The 1994 Republican Revolution was the result of a TERRIBLE Democrat Party and a terribly foolish first two years of the Clinton presidency. As a result, Clinton got a Republican House and a Republican Senate which – as Free Market Capitalist points to – provided the climate in which Clinton said, “The era of big government is over” and governed like a moderate Republican. And there is no question that these Republican policies, combined with the previous three things above, created a period of good strong economic growth.
Did Clinton “raise taxes”? Yes, he raised the top marginal income tax rate. But he cut many other taxes, such as capital gains, which ultimately resulted in a net tax CUT for most investors.